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‘Fossilizing’ With a Camera

Hiroshi Sugimoto photographing diorama displays that get extra attention before a shoot in Manhattan.Credit
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

In a corner of his airy studio looking down on the High Line in Chelsea, Hiroshi Sugimoto maintains a kind of private natural history museum, a choice paring from the immense collection of wunderkammer artifacts he has amassed since becoming one of the art world’s most successful photographers.

There is a speckled shard of moon rock. There is a soccer-ball-size chunk of iron meteorite that fell in Namibia, almost too heavy to hoist off the windowsill where it now sits. There are fossilized dinosaur eggs that look like props from “Alien.” And there is a small manmade object that Mr. Sugimoto fetched from a cabinet on a recent afternoon: an Egyptian cat sarcophagus from around 200 B.C., with the elegantly cast form of the memorialized feline perched atop the sealed rectangular bronze box.

He handed it to a visitor and told him to shake it. Something dry rattled around inside, making a sad, ancient maraca sound.

“It’s in there but we’ll never be able to see it,” he said, smiling placidly.

Like many contemporary photographers, Mr. Sugimoto’s work grapples with questions of perception and photography’s claims to truth. But his interests have always reached further, to an almost scientific concern with time and time’s inconvenient companion, mortality.

Among the first pictures that brought this Japanese-born photographer acclaim were ones he began more than 30 years ago of dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History. The photographs were, in a sense, nature twice removed — once by the naturalist’s rifle and the taxidermist, the second time by Mr. Sugimoto’s large-format camera and what he produced from it in the darkroom.

He compares the work to successive stages of fossilization. And on a moderately crowded weekday morning not long ago, Mr. Sugimoto was out fossilizing again, in the Natural History Museum’s inky-dark Hall of North American Forests. It was the first time in more than two decades that he had returned to the dioramas to continue working through an idea that won’t leave him alone. (He last shot in the museum in 1994, before that in 1982, and initially in the late ’70s.)

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Hiroshi SugimotoCredit
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

The series has often focused on scenes of animals — polar bears, musk oxen, African antelope, ostriches — that come off, in his stark black-and-white translations, as surreal, tricking the eye much more effectively than the dioramas themselves into believing that they are images of nature taken on the Serengeti or in the Artic, too perfectly composed to believe.

But this time around, Mr. Sugimoto, 64, has directed his attention to darker matters, to plant-and-tree-dominated dioramas that present what he sees as a vision of the earth after humankind and most complex animal life have had their existential whirl and disappeared, a relatively brief interlude on the planet’s 4.5 billion-year calendar.

“Maybe it is my age,” he said during an interview in his studio. “I’m starting to take a very long view.” He gestured out the window to the Manhattan skyline. “In a 100 years, if we weren’t here, this whole city would start to look like a forest again.”

Mr. Sugimoto — whose work is now on view in London in a show inaugurating the Pace Gallery’s outpost there, pairing his bare seascapes with Mark Rothko’s late black-and-gray paintings — picked nine new dioramas to shoot at the history museum. And because the museum was able to permit him only a day’s access to photograph, during regular open hours, he and his many assistants plotted that day with all the precision of a military flanking maneuver.

First, weaving through patrons, the assistants had to erect tall frames for black curtains that cloaked the chosen dioramas, to eliminate reflection on the glass. Then Mr. Sugimoto set up his beloved R. H. Phillips and Sons 8x10 camera inside the curtains, focused it and took Polaroid film test shots, which he examined painstakingly in the beam of a spotlight shining down on the nearby bust of a long-dead botanist.

When the shutter was finally snapped, for exposures lasting as long as five minutes, the work was sometimes not even then at an end. In one diorama, “Timberline in the Northern Rocky Mountains,” a permanent spotlight shining on a painted cloud bank was too bright and would have marred the exposure.

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Hiroshi Sugimoto goes over details before shooting a diorama at the American Museum of Natural History. He had to plan extensively for a recent one-day shoot at the museum.Credit
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

So an assistant, Hiroshi Sumiyama, got inside the curtains, dressed head-to-toe in solid black — a cheap Halloween ninja costume that everyone on the team, including Mr. Sugimoto, wore that day to eliminate the possibility of reflection. Holding up a black pole, he energetically waved a placard attached to the top of the pole during the length of the three-and-a-half-minute exposure, to “dodge” down the brightness of the clouds in a way that is usually done in the darkroom.

Because he was reflecting no light and constantly moving — it looked like a kind of hopped-up ceremonial dance — his form would not show up on the picture, though his darkening efforts would. “Ritual over,” Mr. Sugimoto said, after the shutter snapped closed. In his ninja suit, he added, deadpanning: “I’m inviting the spirits into my photography. It’s an act of God.”

Elisabeth Sussman, a curator and photography expert at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which includes Mr. Sugimoto’s work in its collection, said that his pictures have always worked at “extremes between this kind of Buddhist meditativeness and an incredible formal control.”

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“And they also have this wonderful simultaneous quality of conceptualism and photographing what’s right in front of us, or what we think is right in front of us,” she said.

Mr. Sugimoto said he continued to return to the Museum of Natural History — and to other natural history museums around the world — in part because he sees something in them, a realer-than-real, that he is able to capture a little better each time. “I’m trying to make it as close as possible to my wished vision of what it should look like,” he said.

Back in the studio a few days earlier, after displaying his artifact collection, he showed off an auction catalog of new items on his wish list, ones that also spoke eloquently of nature and its strangeness, but in a very different way than a meteorite. The auction was for ancient torture devices, including a spiked neck ring that looked like something Duchamp would have happily declared a readymade.